{"id":14987,"date":"2017-10-11T20:50:04","date_gmt":"2017-10-12T00:50:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/?p=14987"},"modified":"2017-10-11T20:50:04","modified_gmt":"2017-10-12T00:50:04","slug":"makingroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/makingroom\/","title":{"rendered":"making room"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

A<\/span> few weeks ago I phoned my son Jack in Asheville. \u201cHow would you feel about me taking over your bedroom at home and turning it into a writing space?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d hesitated for weeks before raising this idea. But Jack didn\u2019t hesitate in his response. \u201cOh, that\u2019s fine,\u201d he said, \u201cyou can do whatever you want with my room.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although we have a tiny office on the first floor of our house, I\u2019ve never written a word in it. The desktop computer is my husband\u2019s and his in-box sits beside it, overflowing with not-urgent papers and clippings and instruction manuals. The window above the desk looks out to the driveway and whatever vehicles happen to be parked there. The counter is a repository for checkbooks and bills to be paid, stamps and envelopes. And the chair, just the right height for Steve, is not very inviting to me. The office is a perfectly good place to write a check or Google driving directions, but it\u2019s not a space my muse has ever chosen to visit.<\/p>\n

Most of the words I\u2019ve produced over the last ten years in this house have come from a stool at the kitchen table, where I look out to a view of fields and mountains and sky. I\u2019ve spent countless hours perched there, staring out the windows above the sink while trying to pull my thoughts together. As a mother, as a wife, as a cook and homemaker, and also as a writer, I\u2019ve always been drawn to this room, my own home base, whether I\u2019m chopping something, stirring something, washing something, or writing something. Soups and emails, jars of jam and blog posts, thank you notes and books, all have come from my kitchen. More often than not, several of these things are coming together at once, which means that the written work can easily be shifted to the bottom of my priorities list. No one actually cares if I write or not, but dinner does have to appear on that table every night.<\/p>\n

And yet, as summer turned to fall this year, I found myself longing for some other kind of place, a place not in the middle of the action but away from it. A place in which some new work might begin to take shape, privately and quietly. A place where there is nothing that needs to be chopped or watered or cleaned or stirred, where books of memoir and poetry would be easily at hand, and where my laptop and notes and papers don\u2019t have to be put away at the end of the day so that placemats and napkins and silverware can be laid out in their place.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t sure, after Magical Journey<\/strong><\/a> was published five years ago, whether I would ever write another book. I\u2019m still not sure. But I do know this: turning fifty-nine last week has given me pause. In a year, I\u2019ll be sixty, and there are some things in my life that need to shift, some thinking and writing I very much want to do.<\/p>\n

My sixtieth year has begun with an urgent longing for quiet time and open-ended hours and, too, for a space that is devoted not to many things but to one thing: the work of the imagination, the murmurings of the soul, the possibility of articulating and embodying some just-forming ideas about how to live in the world as an older person.<\/p>\n

Hence, my call to Jack.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about all the things in your desk?\u201d I asked him. \u201cI don\u2019t need any of it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"\"T<\/span>hat night, I reported our conversation to Steve, and the next morning he summoned me into Jack\u2019s room. \u201cTell me what you\u2019re envisioning here,\u201d he said, as we looked around at the olive green walls, the bookshelves packed with Stephen King mysteries and old textbooks, the coin jar on the desk, the squash and basketball trophies dimmed by dust.<\/p>\n

My birthday gift from my husband was carte blanche to create the space I wanted here. And, in truth, my gift from Jack was exactly the same thing. We called a painter.<\/p>\n

And then, on the day I began emptying desk drawers and throwing high school notebooks into a trash bag, I snapped a photo of Jack\u2019s collection of Crazybones (a prized first-grade possession) and called him again. \u201cIs there anything<\/em> here you want me to save or send down to you?\u201d I asked, fighting back sudden, unexpected tears. He asked me to keep his books, to pack them all into boxes till the day when he has a larger place of his own and room for them. The rest could go.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cI\u2019m not attached,\u201d he said simply. \u201cThat\u2019s not really my room anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

What I realized in that moment was that he<\/em> wasn\u2019t attached, but I was. Taking my son\u2019s bedroom apart and turning it into something else meant I\u2019d no longer peek in on my way past the door and see \u201chim.\u201d Never again would I catch a fleeting sense of his presence there, or see his tiny hippo figurines marching silently across a shelf, or the row of Shel Silverstein books we\u2019d spent so many long-ago hours reading aloud together.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s something else, too. My emotions about dismantling Jack\u2019s bedroom are more complicated than physically acknowledging the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. The truth is, this room was also the setting for some deeply painful struggles, secrets and lies, dashed hopes and heartbreaking realities.<\/p>\n

\"\"T<\/span>he happy adolescence we hoped our son would enjoy here never happened. More often than not when he was home, the door to this room was closed. What went on behind that door was the beginning of a downward spiral that, at the time, left us all feeling helpless and angry and frightened. After Jack abruptly left home at sixteen for a stint in wilderness therapy and boarding school, it was all I could do to walk past his empty, silent room. It felt like a rebuke. When we sent our son away for treatment, I wasn\u2019t at all sure whether we\u2019d failed him as parents or helped to save him.<\/p>\n

The other day, I pulled an old, nearly empty Smart Water bottle out of the back of a desk drawer, tossed it into the trash bag, and then, without even thinking, pulled it out again, unscrewed the cap, and tasted the clear liquid. Vodka. Time collapsed and suddenly I was once again the mother of a silent, distant teenager, finding my way in the darkness with nothing to go on but my own maternal intuition. Yes, this excavation is hard. For a lot of reasons.<\/p>\n

Jack has been sober for nearly two years. A month shy of twenty-five, he works in a residential treatment center for troubled adolescents, a job he loves and is good at. He shares a comfortable, homey house with two friends and is a devoted \u201cparent\u201d to his beloved dog Carol. His own rocky path into adulthood has given him deep compassion for the kids he works with, and his own commitment to sobriety has taught him a lot about staying with uncomfortable feelings, accepting them, trusting that they, too, will pass.<\/p>\n

And so, I shared with Jack that I was having a harder time cleaning out his old room than I\u2019d expected. He got it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just finished writing a new song,\u201d he told me a few minutes later, after I\u2019d composed myself. \u201cIt\u2019s about addiction, and denial, and getting sober. I\u2019m pretty excited about it.\u201d I said I\u2019d love to read the lyrics and he promised to send them. Then, after a pause, he said, \u201cOr, I could just rap it for you right now.\u201d And he did.<\/p>\n

\"\"T<\/span>hese words are the first to come from my new office on the second floor. The walls are painted a soft shade of blue. There are flowers in a vase, a friend\u2019s drawing on the wall, my own books on the shelves. There\u2019s also a painting Jack did in 8th<\/sup> grade, when he was assigned to copy a work by a master, and some figures he made in grade school that, to me, speak eloquently of the creative, funny, sensitive child he always was and still is at heart. As it turns out, it feels just right to make space here for what has been, for what still is, and for what yet might be.<\/p>\n

\"\"I<\/span>n the kitchen below, I can hear the dishwasher completing its cycle. But I\u2019m not tempted to stop what I\u2019m doing in order to put dishes away, or to wipe crumbs off the counter, or to water the fern. There is nothing to pull me away from where I am. When I look up from this screen, I gaze out the window at the stonewall and trees that Jack would have seen as a teenager, had he lifted the shade in his bedroom. One by one, the leaves drift down.<\/p>\n

\"\"(My gratitude to Jack — for giving me his old room and, even more, for allowing me to publish this essay. \u00a0One thing we’ve both learned is that every time we tell of our own struggles, we clear a space for someone else to share theirs, too.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Save<\/span>Save<\/span><\/p>\n

Save<\/span>Save<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago I phoned my son Jack in Asheville. \u201cHow would you feel about me taking over your bedroom at home and turning it into a writing space?\u201d I asked. I\u2019d hesitated for weeks before raising this idea. But Jack didn\u2019t hesitate in his response. \u201cOh, that\u2019s fine,\u201d he said, \u201cyou can do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,22,35,8,11,14,49,15],"tags":[59,115,263,327,383,477],"class_list":{"0":"post-14987","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-addiction","8":"category-aging-2","9":"category-change","10":"category-letting-go","11":"category-parenting","12":"category-parenting-young-adults","13":"category-soul-work","14":"category-writing","15":"category-writing-and-reading","16":"tag-addiction","17":"tag-change-2","18":"tag-letting-go-2","19":"tag-parenting-young-adults","20":"tag-sobriety","21":"tag-writing-2","22":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}